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> It's that the price you're paying for the product is too low for them to provide general support on an individual basis. Exactly. It's always puzzled me why
by davidp 14y ago
> It's that the price you're paying for the product is too low for them to provide general support on an individual basis.
Exactly. It's always puzzled me why they don't offer a higher tier of support for more money.
The only reason I've been able to come up with so far is that they want to keep the flexibility to rapidly evolve their services. Customers who pay more money tend to get bent out of shape when you do that. But I think there ought to be a happy medium where 1) it's understood that things can change, and 2) you have at least email support for the service you're buying, and maybe even phone support. Peace of mind is worth a lot of money for some things.
- ghaff 14y agoThere's a real tension between stability and pace of change and finding that balance isn't easy. That said, some Internet companies--I'd add eBay in my experience, Facebook also based on lots of stories--use huge amounts of automation and just don't seem to have the processes (and likely the staffing) to resolve problems with competent individual attention when a person has to intervene. It's partly a matter of scale but Amazon, for example, seems to do a much better job overall.
- KaoruAoiShiho 14y agoAmazon also is an expert at losing money and having no margins.
- ghaff 14y agoRetail, in general, is a low margin business. In any case, notwithstanding Amazon's current financials--it's been investing a lot in expansion--any retail business, even a large volume one, that can't do a reasonable job at customer service (a fair bit of which will inevitably involve talking to a human) is probably not going to be very successful.